This application claims benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 11-089409 filed on Mar. 28, 2000, the contents of which are incorporated by the reference.
The present invention relates to telephone number display methods for portable telephone sets and, more particularly, to a method of displaying such data as telephone numbers and names preliminarily stored in a memory provided in a portable telephone set on a display thereof.
Data extraction by retrieval of a plurality of telephone numbers registered in a prior art portable telephone set will now be described. A portable telephone set user may extract a desired telephone number in a number of telephone numbers registered in the set by retrieval according to any one of the following five different retrieval methods.
In a first method, registered names and corresponding telephone numbers are displayed in the Japanese 50-kana sequence on a display by scrolling them in a predetermined key operation. In a second method, names and corresponding telephone numbers are displayed by scrolling them in a registered memory number sequence. In this case, the data may be displayed from data of memory number 1 or from data of memory number 50 by using a jump function. In a third method, some portions of preliminarily registered sets of affixing kanas are inputted, then names corresponding to the sets affixing kanas including the inputted affixing kanas are retrieved, and names of extracted cases and corresponding telephone numbers are displayed. A fourth method is used for a portable telephone set, in which telephone numbers can be registered in a plurality of groups. In this method, when a particular group is selected, names registered in that group are displayed together with corresponding telephone numbers by scrolling them in the Japanese 50-kana sequence. In a fifth method, some portions of preliminarily registered telephone numbers are inputted, and only telephone numbers including the inputted telephone number portions are extracted and displayed together with corresponding names.
In either of the above cases, what are displayed are names and telephone numbers. Where the data are registered in independent groups, group names and drawings each corresponding to each group are also displayed. In the case of retrieving data with the memory numbers, names, telephone numbers and memory numbers are displayed.
However, in the above prior art portable telephone set the total number of cases extracted by the retrieval is not displayed. That is, the user can not recognize the total number of cases extracted by the retrieval. In addition, the user can not designate the sequence of display.
Furthermore, the user cannot recognize the sequential number of the case being displayed when he or she is searching a desired case by scrolling the cases extracted by the retrieval. Moreover, by making continual scroll after all the cases have been displayed the first displayed case is restored. Therefore, it is impossible for the user to recognize whether all the cases have been retrieved.